1946: Men and Apes

I heard the news that they had discovered skeletons of ape men in a cave. I was left pensive, saying, "How can they assert this? They must have been ugly men. There are ape like faces and ape like bodies even now. Were primitive men perhaps different from us in their skeleton? But another thought came: "But different in beauty. I cannot think that the first men were uglier than we, since they were closer to the perfect model that God had created, who was certainly very handsome as well as very strong." I considered how the beauty of the most perfect work of creation had managed to become so degraded as to allow scientists to deny that man had been created as man by God and was not an evolution from the monkey.

"Jesus spoke to me and said: "Look for the key in chapter six of Genesis. Read it." I read it. Jesus asked: "Do you understand?"

"No, Lord. I understand that men at once became corrupt, and nothing more. I don't know how the chapter is connected with ape-man."

Jesus smiled and said:

"You are not the only one who does not understand. The learned and scientists do not understand, nor do believers or atheists. Pay attention to Me. And start reading: [Genesis 6-4]. 'When men began to multiply on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of heaven, O children of Seth, saw how beautiful the daughters of man [daughters of Cain] were, and so they took for their wives as many of them as they chose.... At that time the Nephilim appeared on earth (as well as later), after the sons of heaven had intercourse with the daughters of man, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.' The men who, because of the strength of their skeletons, impress your scientists, who deduce that at the beginning of the ages man was much taller and stronger than he now is, and from the structure of their cranium they deduce that man derives from the ape. The usual errors of men in the face of the mystery of creation.

"You have not yet understood. I'll explain more clearly. If disobedience to God's order and its consequences were able to inject into the innocent, with all its varied manifestations of lust, gluttony, wrath, envy, pride, and avarice, and this injection soon developed into fratricide, provoked by pride, wrath, envy, and avarice, what deeper decadence and deeper dominion by Satan must have been provoked by this second sin? --A second sin adding to Adam and Eve's, first sin.

"Adam and Eve had sinned against the first of God's commands for man. A command implied in the other one, obedience, given to the couple: 'Eat everything, but not from this tree [Genesis 2:15-16, 3:2-3]. Obedience is love. If they had obeyed without yielding to any pressure by Evil exerted upon their spirit, intellect, heart, and flesh, they would have loved God 'with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their strength,' as was explicitly ordered by the Lord much later [Deuteronomy 6]. They did not and were punished. But they did not sin in other other branch of love--love for one's neighbor. They did not curse even Cain, but wept over the one dead in the flesh and the one dead in spirit in equal measure, recognizing that the pain which God had permitted was just because they had created Pain with their sin and had to be the first to experience it in all of its ramifications. They thus remained children of God, and, along with them, the descendants coming after this pain. Cain sinned against love for God and love for his neighbor: He violated love completely, and God cursed him, and Cain did not repent. He and his children were thus nothing but children of the animal called man.

"If the first sin of Adam made man degenerate to such a degree, what measure of decadence must have been produced by the second, to which God's cures was joined? What must have been the sources of sin in the heart of the animal-man and what power must they have reached after Cain had not only listened to the counsel of the Accursed One, but embraced him as his beloved master, killing as ordered by him? The descent of one branch, the one poisoned by Satanic possession, knew no rest and took on a thousand faces. When Satan seizes, he corrupts in all ramifications. When Satan is king, the subject becomes a satan. A satan with all the unbridledness of Satan. A satan going against divine and human law. A satan violating even the most elementary and instinctive norms of life among men endowed with a soul and becoming brutish with the foulest sins of bestial man.

"Wherever God is not present, Satan is. Wherever man no longer has a living soul, he is the beast-man. The beast loves the beasts. Carnal lust--more than carnal because it is seized and sharpened by Satan--makes him avid for all unions. What is horrid and disturbing, like a nightmare, strikes him as beautiful and seductive. What is licit does not satisfy him. It is too little and too honest. He is mad with lust for what is illicit, degrading, and bestial.

"Those who were no longer children of God, because, with their father and like their father, they had fled God to accept Satan, ventured precisely into what is illicit, degrading, and bestial. And they had monsters as sons and daughters. Those monsters who now impress your scientists and lead them into error. Those monsters who, because of their powerful physique and savage beauty and ferocious boldness--results of union between Cain and the beasts, between the most beastly children of Cain and the brutes--seduced the children of God--that is, the descendants of Seth through Enos, Cainain, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch of Jared--not to be confused with Enoch of Cain [ Genesis 4:17. See Genesis 4:25-26 and 5 for Adam's descendants ]--, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah, the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth. It was then that God--to keep the branch of the children of men--sent the universal deluge to extinguish men's lust under the weight of the waters and destroy the monsters begotten by the lust of the godless, insatiable in sensuality because they were aroused by the fires of Satan.

"And man, contemporary man, jabbers about somatic lines and zygomatic angles and, in not wanting to admit a Creator, because he is too proud to acknowledge he has been made, he admits descent from beasts! In order to say to himself, 'By ourselves we evolved from animals into men.' He degrades himself, practices self-degradation, because he refuses to humble himself before God. And he is sinking. Oh, he really is sinking! In the times of the initial corruption his appearance was animal. Now this thought and heart are, and his soul, because of deeper and deeper union with evil, has taken on Satan's visage in too many cases.

"Write this dictation in the book. I would have dealt with the subject in greater breadth, as I told you in the place of your exile, to refute the blameworthy theories of too many pseudoexperts. But there must clearly be a punishment for those who do not want to hear Me in the words you write under my dictation. I would have revealed great mysteries. So that man would know, now that the times are ripe. It is no longer a time to content the masses with fables. Under the metaphor of the ancient stories there are the key truths for all the mysteries in the universe, and I would have explained them through my little, patient John. So that man would draw strength from knowing the truth to climb back up from the abyss and be on the same level as the enemy in the final struggle which will precede the end of the world which, is spite of all of God's help, did not want to become a pre-paradise, but preferred to become pre-hell.

"And show this page, without handing it over, to the ones you know you should. For one it will help against the remains of a pseudoscience atrophying the heart; for others it will assist a already strong spirituality through which they may see the unmistakable sign of God in everything."

[4] Now giants were upon the earth in those days. For after the sons of God went in to the daughters of men, and they brought forth children, these are the mighty men of old, men of renown. [5] And God seeing that the wickedness of men was great on the earth, and that all the thought of their heart was bent upon evil at all times,

[2] The sons of God: The descendants of Seth and Enos are here called sons of God from their religion and piety: whereas the ungodly race of Cain, who by their carnal affections lay grovelling upon the earth, are called the children of men. The unhappy consequence of the former marrying with the latter, ought to be a warning to Christians to be very circumspect in their marriages; and not to suffer themselves to be determined in their choice by their carnal passion, to the prejudice of virtue or religion.

[3] His days shall be: The meaning is, that man's days, which before the flood were usually 900 years, should now be reduced to 120 years. Or rather, that God would allow men this term of 120 years, for their repentance and conversion, before he would send the deluge.

[4] Giants: It is likely the generality of men before the flood were of a gigantic stature in comparison with what men now are. But these here spoken of are called giants, as being not only tall in stature, but violent and savage in their dispositions, and mere monsters of cruelty and lust.